Mamdani Cancels the $225 Million Public Safety Academy Planned for College Point
The joint training facility for more than a dozen city law-enforcement agencies — a plan that passed through three mayors and picked up the name 'Cop City' — is dead: City Hall says there is no funding for it in the budget and the $225 million is not a good use of public money.
A training campus that three mayors handed to each other is not getting built. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has cancelled the proposed public safety academy for College Point, Queens — a $225 million facility, planned for the Police Academy campus, that would have consolidated training for officers and agents across more than a dozen city law-enforcement agencies.
City Hall's explanation is a budget sentence and a training argument. A representative said the mayor 'decided not to move forward with the proposed public safety training facility and there is no funding for it in our budget.' His spokesman, Sam Raskin, added the reasoning: 'Police officers, correction officers and other law enforcement personnel have distinct responsibilities and training needs, and we determined that spending $225 million to consolidate their existing training facilities was neither necessary nor a good use of public resources.' A spokesperson summarised the decision to City & State in one line: 'We stopped plans for the previously proposed public safety academy.'
The plan's lineage explains its size. It began in 2017 under Mayor Bill de Blasio as a roughly $100 million correctional training academy; in 2021 the city earmarked $225 million for a Department of Correction facility on the NYPD academy campus in College Point; and Mayor Eric Adams expanded the concept in 2024 into a unified academy for as many as 16 agencies — the version that opponents, Mamdani among them, took to calling 'Cop City' after Atlanta's contested training complex. 'We do not need to spend more than $200 million on a 'Cop City' training facility in Queens,' Mamdani told City & State in 2024, as the Assembly member for the Queens district next door. The facility had been expected to break ground earlier this year.
The cancellation drew the expected split. City Council member Vickie Paladino called the move 'disappointing but unsurprising,' and Republican Minority Leader David Carr decried the scrapping of the training site; Adams, defending his design while in office, had said its critics lacked the 'full understanding of how to ensure the city's No. 1 issue: public safety.' What replaces the plan, on the record so far, is nothing consolidated at all: each agency keeps training where it trains now, and the College Point lot keeps waiting.
